


some of us are a long way from home

by SociopathicArchangel



Category: Black Panther (2018), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Miraculous Ladybug, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Gen, the avengers au no one asked for but here we are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 15:24:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14751446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SociopathicArchangel/pseuds/SociopathicArchangel
Summary: It’s Plagg who finds him, in the wreckage of what used to be his house, while all around him, Paris burns. Something about portals opening and closing everywhere, spaceships shooting through them, sometimes accompanied by monsters. He thinks he saw a glimpse of Mjolnir earlier, streaking across the air before disappearing into another portal, no doubt in search of its owner, but he can’t be too sure with his vision blurring from the bloodloss.





	some of us are a long way from home

****

“A leather catsuit.”

Adrien shrugs, running two fingers over his eyes to signal the nanobots to form the mask over his face. He puts his hands up to his hair and flicks his wrists up to have his extra ears materialize.

Tony Stark clicks his tongue and then waves a hand before walking off, because that’s apparently all he’s gonna do in response to Wakanda having nanotech before him. “What is up with Wakanda and cats?”

Plagg just throws his head back and laughs, and Adrien turns to him, amused.

“Good first impression?” he asks.

“I think he’s miffed Shuri has him beat,” the man says.

Adrien drops his transformation, nanobots returning back to his ring in a small flash of bright green. He sits himself down on the couch, sighing.

“Tired?”

“Jetlagged like _hell,”_ Adrien says, running a hand over his face. “I need a catnap.”

“Why don’t you get one?”

“You know when you’re tired but you’re also bored, so you don’t take a nap because you want something to do?”

Plagg laughs, leans over, and messes his hair up. Adrien swats him away.

“If everything goes well and Stark considers the king’s proposal,” Plagg says, “You won’t be bored for long.”

Adrien hums, closing his eyes and starting to drift already. Then he sits up, and looks around. “Where’s Erik again?”

“Lab with Banner and Shuri, why?”

Adrien patters off towards the doors, already running at full sprint towards the lab, grinning. Erik never says no to fun.

Plagg sighs and follows after him.

* * *

 

****

It’s Plagg who finds him, in the wreckage of what used to be his house, while all around him, Paris burns. Something about portals opening and closing everywhere, spaceships shooting through them, sometimes accompanied by monsters. He thinks he saw a glimpse of Mjolnir earlier, streaking across the air before disappearing into another portal, no doubt in search of its owner, but he can’t be too sure with his vision blurring from the bloodloss.

He’s under a pile of rubble, ribcage two seconds away from giving up, desperately trying to claw his way out. And Plagg is running by, talking into an earpiece lit up in blue, when he notices the movement in the wreck.

The man stops, looking at him, and Adrien lifts a hand weakly, mouthing, _“Help.”_

There’s a few seconds of silence as Plagg listens to whatever is being relayed to him over the comm, and then he says, “Yeah, uh, might have a slight delay. I just found a kid.”

Another pause, and then Plagg is moving over to him. Adrien’s not quite sure what happens next, but he remembers Plagg adjusting a ring that he’s wearing, a flash of green running up the man’s arms, and then the rubble is being lifted from him. He’s being pulled out and carried, and then Plagg is rattling off instructions into the comm.

He blacks out. The next time he’s awake, he’s in a room straight out of sci-fi movies. Or Tony Stark’s lab.

Shuri laughs her head off when he tells her this, awkwardly shuffling from foot to foot and wondering where the pain in his chest had gone, when he’s sure his ribs had broken and punctured his lungs, maybe even left shards there to shred it up.

“Plagg’s just a softie,” she tells him, and Plagg, from where he’s standing by the glass wall watching the train pass by, makes a displeased noise.

Explanations come in droves, and Adrien has to sit on a table while Shuri talks: Plagg’s a Wakandan Paris operative; he’d been responding to the scene when the portals had opened – and no one knows what’s up with that yet, but London’s just cleaning up the mess, and it seems Thor _was_ involved so maybe he hadn’t imagined Mjolnir – and found Adrien and brought him here as fast as he could because the kid was dying; Shuri’s lab is the best in the world; they don’t know what happened to his family yet.

He deflates at that. He doesn’t have much left in the world. He’s never counted his money, or his fame, or his modelling career. All he’s got is his father, Nathalie, and Gorilla. He can’t lose them.

“Hey,” Plagg says. Adrien looks up to see that he’s walked over. “We’ll hear about them soon.”

Adrien nods. He can’t bring himself to ask the man who saved his life why he couldn’t root around what was left of his house to find the rest of his family.

Shuri distracts him by pulling up a holographic screen and talking to him about her designs, and he easily gets lost in the discussion of physics and the intricacies of handling Vibranium. He stays there, for hours, until Plagg comes back with the news that world-renowned fashion designer Gabriel Agreste is dead.

* * *

 

Plagg brings him back to Paris to mourn.

The funeral is on a dark, dreary day, with stormclouds rolling in and thunder in the distance. He wonders briefly, if it’s Thor’s doing, and then lets out a tiny, hysterical laugh. Maybe, maybe not. Not like Adrien can march up to the man and ask him things. Ask him what the hell was up with the portals that inflicted monsters on his city and led to him standing in front of three caskets.

His father, Nathalie, and Gorilla. All in one fell swoop. He doesn’t even know where his mother is anymore. He’s fifteen, and he doesn’t know what to do, and he’s left floundering for what happens next because his life had been dictated to him from start to finish.

He stands in the rain along with Nathalie and Gorilla’s own families. Some of them put a comforting hand on his shoulder, and he feels a bit of kinship with them. They’re all here for the same reason: they’ve all lost someone, and none of them are at fault. They only feel hurt and unfairness, and Adrien thinks it’s sick that he finds this sense of belongingness in a setting for loss.

All around him, there are also families burying their dead, all mourning, all weeping, and that blanket of being surrounded by those who understand spreads. He looks at everyone gathered around holes in the earth as they put the people they have loved to rest, and thinks, it’s really death that brings people together.

It’s always been like that. In times of tragedy, in times of sorrow – that’s when everything quiets, and everyone comes together and sits and witnesses and pays their respects.

A girl standing without an umbrella catches his eye. Her dress is clinging to her form as she’s drenched, and she bitterly looks at where her parents are being buried, fists clenched at her side.

Adrien approaches her and lifts the umbrella over her head, and she turns to him, blinking surprised blue eyes at him.

He says nothing, but continues to shield her against the rain until the downpour stops. After the funeral, Plagg finds him, and he waves the girl goodbye as he walks back to where a car is waiting. He still doesn’t know what’s coming next, so when Plagg offers to help him, he says yes.

* * *

 

He’s brilliant with physics and Shuri is more than happy to teach him a few things, and more than once, T’Challa finds them both running around the lab aiming force-field guns at each other, in a game a bit like paintball, except whoever got hit was, well, imprisoned in a human-sized hamster ball made of pure energy.

It’s useful for taking down enemies without harming them. Or quickly giving civilians a safe place, as the shield is impenetrable – similar to the shields they’re using at the barrier – and all the civilian has to do once inside is roll themself out of the line of attack and wait until someone can deactivate the shield.

T’Challa usually just tuts and shakes his head, and puts them both in timeout, which consists of giving them a list of things to do so they behave. Plagg checks up on them to make sure they’re not throwing crumpled paper balls at each other.

When Shuri’s tasked with creating new designs for the Black Panther suit, Adrien takes intensive notes, and the princess laughs at his efforts fondly.

“You’ll get there someday,” she says.

He grins at her, and then shows her his first attempts at making his own nanobots, and she sits down with him to point out what needs adjustments and tells him how well he’s catching on in the short time he’s been here.

He makes the Chat Noir suit for fun months later, and Shuri claps loudly when he shows it off while Plagg just rolls his eyes.

“It could use some work,” Shuri says, and then adjusts her bracelets. “But – I’m calling brother and telling him he has a fanboy – ”

Adrien launches himself at her, intent on stopping her from embarrassing him, and Plagg laughs so much and goes to tell T’Challa himself. When T’Challa sees the suit, he looks like he’s holding in laughter, but he pats Adrien’s head kindly, and Adrien feels like he’s going to cry.

* * *

 

Plagg thinks it’s a good way to work off his grief and restless energy, so he’s allowed to join the training for young warriors. It’s hell, but he loves it, even when there’s absolutely no mercy and they’re drilled for hours on end.

He talks Plagg’s head off every evening about it, and the man looks like he’s regretting signing up as Adrien’s guardian, but never tells him to shut up. Although, Adrien supposes, being offered disgustingly smelly cheese is a way of getting him to quiet down.

So he trains, taking to swords easily given his fencing background, and every night he hangs out with Plagg until he passes out, and pesters Shuri in her lab whenever he has a rest day so she can bounce off ideas on him, sometimes more literally than figuratively. He swaps stories with the other students and gets a tour of the city when he confesses he hasn’t explored every nook and cranny of it yet.

He mourns with everyone when the king dies. He cheers when T’Challa succeeds his father. He’s forced to strap on the prototype suit Shuri’s made for him and had planned to give him on his birthday to save his own life, and help buy them a little more time with stopping Killmonger.

He ends up with a hell of a concussion and another set of broken ribs, but he happily chatters about how _cool_ his new suit is to Plagg, and the man taps his head and says, “You’re not keeping it.”

“Why not!”

“Adrien, you’re seventeen,” he says, “And maybe in another life, you would have been a full-pledged warrior, but here, you’re a kid.”

Adrien pouts, but says nothing and gets on the healing table when he’s asked to.

A few days later, when he’s sitting by the riverside with his fellow trainees, trying to see what the fuss about the White Wolf is all about, Shuri discreetly slips a silver ring to him and whispers, “It’s your First Post-Battle Concussion present.”

When he asks her about it the next time he’s being her sounding board in her lab, she tells him she was planning on giving it to him as a present anyway.

“And,” she says, “For if you ever plan to return to Paris.”

He actually hugs her at that. She knows exactly what it’s like to lose family. She knows what it’s like to say, “Never again.”

* * *

 

Erik’s poking around the lab when Adrien finds him. He motions to where Shuri is arguing with Bruce over something while a holographic screen is pulled up in front of them, and Adrien nods and walks over to him instead of approaching the princess.

“So,” Erik says, “How’d Stark react?”

“In Plagg’s words, miffed that Shuri beat him to nanotech,” Adrien says. When the king had decided to open Wakanda to the world, sharing research and technological advancement had been part of it, and what better way to facilitate the sharing than approaching the world’s most popular tech manufacturer?

So far, negotiations are still underway, and T’Challa’s still talking to Pepper, but Adrien thinks they’re covering good ground. After all, he’s just demonstrated that Shuri’s nanobots could synthesize _leather._

Erik scoffs, and then points to his cousin. “She beats everyone to everything.”

“That she does,” Adrien sighs, “Man, one day, I’ll get my own lab.”

“Keep dreaming, Agreste,” Erik says, laughing. The guy’s a long way from how he was a few months ago, most likely from T’Challa’s plan to extend Wakanda’s reach to the rest of the world, and the fact that he’d been allowed to have a say in it. Then again, there’s also the monitoring tag on his leg.

“ _One day,_ ” Adrien stresses. “Figuring out actual fast travel would be amazing.”

Bruce Banner turns to both of them suddenly, adjusting his glasses. “You guys are working on teleportation?”

They both share a look, and then Adrien lifts a shoulder. “We’ve got bullet trains going at the speed of sound already. Why not?”

Shuri grins when Bruce turns back to her, and then launches into another flurry of explanations while the man listens, flabbergasted. Tony Stark enters the lab a few hours later, T’Challa and Pepper behind him, and Bruce grabs him to relay everything he’s just been told.

Adrien laughs softly. He looks down at the ring on his hand, and thinks about laboratories, and the idea of making sure no one ever has to suffer through an untimely loss again.

He thinks it might be possible.

* * *

 

All the way at Queens, Marinette Dupain-Cheng stands with her cousin and classmate, looking down at the suitcase that Tony Stark’s delivered to them.

“Nanotech?” Peter asks Stark’s holographic bust, floating over the bed.

 _“Yep,”_ Stark says. Marinette might be imagining things but he looks a little bummed out announcing that. She wonders why. _“Give it a try and swing by the tower around six. You two are free, right? No patrols? No? Excellent.”_

Marinette has Spanish homework, but she can probably do that while swinging to the tower. She shrugs when Peter turns to her, instead saying, “And Ned?”

_“He can drop by if he wants to. Just don’t be late. I wanna see how those perform for a test run.”_

Ah. That’s why he’s had them delivered instead of calling them both to the tower.

Peter clasps the bracelet onto his wrist just as Marinette fits her earrings on.

“Yeah, I don’t have any idea how to activate these,” she says.

Someone laughs in the background of Stark’s call. It’s a young voice. A familiar voice, but Marinette can’t quite place where she’s heard it from.

 _“The default voice command is just ‘transform me’, actually,”_ the voice says. It has an accent. Stark blinks, going, _“Really?”_

“Oh, that’s cool,” Ned says.

_“Or, you just press down the earrings – it’s like a button, see – or the spider insignia on the bracelet. But sometimes you’re gonna have your hands a little occupied, so, voice commands were an idea.”_

Marinette and Peter share a look.

“It’s a cheesy transformation moment, guys,” Ned says, “You can’t seriously pass it off.”

Marinette clicks her tongue. “Well.”

“‘Nette, come on,” Peter says.

Stark snickers. _“I’ll leave you to your nerding out.”_ And with that, his hologram blinks out of existence from the small bulky disk he’s sent them along with the cases.

Peter immediately gets to his feet and punches the arm with the bracelet out. Marinette laughs.

“You can’t tell me you haven’t been dreaming of this moment your whole _life,”_ he says, “Superhero transformations, ‘Nette.”

“Are there gonna be sparkles and flashes of light?” Marinette asks, getting to her feet.

Ned looks like he wants to pull out his phone to record a historic moment, but just politely steps back, excited and giddy.

“Might be,” Peter says, “We never know until we try.”

Marinette sighs. She opens her mouth to try out the command, but Peter says, “No, no, you gotta pose first.”

“Really?”

“It’s a requirement.”

Marinette shakes her head, fond, but mirrors his pose. When they try out their transformations, there _are_ flashes of light involved. Ned never stops talking about it the whole time he’s on the phone with them while they’re racing towards Stark Tower.

**Author's Note:**

> crack bc why not?


End file.
